Yang Jiang: Meet her in Medias Res

A Frought Saint

So. Meet the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation: Yang Jiang 楊絳. Below, a nice photo of her with her husband (now deceased). Like many dissertation subjects, she has become a prickly, anxiety-inducing topic for the student. The student has read a certain number of his subject's writings and writings about her, and he has put into place a plan of study that will lead to a book-length exposition of her life and work, but he is more than a little afraid that he is not smart enough to handle the project. Virtually all of the student's anxieties about learning Chinese have become concentrated in this old lady.

At some point, I'll try to introduce Yang Jiang elegantly and simply in a wikipedia entry. For today, though, I'll keep to what is currently on my mind: comments on the first biography devoted to her in Chinese.

Kong Qingmao 孔庆茂. Yang Jiang ping zhuan 杨绛评传 [Yang Jiang: A Critical Biography]. Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1998.

To become a saint, you have to give up on irony.

The term "critical" in the title of Kong Qingmao's work -- the first full-length biography of Yang Jiang -- belies what is actually a patchwork condensation of Yang Jiang's own autobiographical essays. By relying almost entirely on Yang Jiang's own writing, Kong manages to inject the rhetoric and style of Yang Jiang's short, fragmented essays into a longer, more complete life story. This shows us how easily autobiography can become biography in the current Chinese book market, which is no doubt one avenue by which Yang Jiang's memories become official history. On the other hand, Mr. Kong seems mostly blind to the value of Yang Jiang's prose style, particularly when it comes to irony. Deprived of her wit and humor, the Yang Jiang of Mr. Kong's biography becomes a sort of everyday saint who seems to deserve fame just for being nice to people -- "possessed of a heavenly nature of benevolence and goodness, no matter who had problems, she would reach out with a helping hand." Moreover, the historical backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, far from coming into clearer focus in Kong's exposition, is dismissed as a "nightmarish historical monster" (lishi de mengmo 歷史的夢魔), a time when ordinary people stopped being ordinary. Stumbling upon Mr. Kong's biography before reading Yang Jiang's autobiographies, the truly uninitiated reader would probably wonder what all the fuss is about, since there is virtually no discursive, objective look at Yang Jiang's literary and political significance. And yet, if we consider that most readers will be using the biography as a supplemental reference to the autobiographical writings, we can deduce that the book's main function is to certify and reaffirm Yang Jiang's literary and political significance in a form that is rather specific to the current context of Chinese life writing: when fragmented autobiographical essays transform into a complete and singular "critical biography," the subject in question is more than ever a role model for readers.

Giving up on irony

An example from the chapter "Going down to the Cadre School" (Xia fang gan xiao) will illustrate what I mean by "patchwork condensation," as well as the literary and political stakes of the patches. Near the end of his chapter, Kong Qingmao writes:

她很慚愧自己經過這番學習改造並沒有多少進步，私心也沒有減少。

She was very ashamed (cankui) that after going through all this ideological reform, she still had not accomplished any personal transformation, and that her selfishness had not decreased. (my translation)

Despite the lack of any citation, readers will probably recognize the statement as a paraphrase from the conclusion to Six Chapters of a Cadre School. The original passage has,

而看到不在这次名单上的老弱病残，又使我愧汗。但不论多么愧汗感激，都不能压减私心的忻喜。这就使我自己明白：改造十多年，再加干校两年，且别说人人企求的进步我没有取得，就连自己这份私心，也没有减少些。我还是依然故我。

And yet, looking at this list of the old and sick, I still felt a twinge of guilt (kuihan). And yet, all that aside, I couldn't rid myself of selfish joy. This made me realize something about myself: that despite more than ten years of ideological reform and two years in a cadre school, not only did I not not achieve the personal transformation that others had sought after so diligently, I hadn't even managed to get rid of my own selfishness. I was the same person I had always been. (translation heavily dependent on Geremie Barmé 1989, but modified to read more literally here).

Kong Qingmao's sentence is written in the third person, as if it were a historical judgment based on his view of the evidence. But as with the vast bulk of the biography, this sentence is in fact little more than a condensed re-arrangement of Yang Jiang's language. The main terms of Kong's sentence -- shame, ideological reform, personal transformation, and selfishness -- are all taken from Yang Jiang's passage, reproduced in the exact same sequence. But a crucial transformation to the term "shame" removes the irony that is inherent and crucial to Yang Jiang's conclusion, and thus removes the sting of her critique of the Cultural Revolution.

In the original conclusion, she feels some shame that she and Qian Zhongshu are on the list of people going home, but other people present in the room are not on the list. She wishes they could all go back together. But Kong's statement, "She was very ashamed...that she had not accomplished any personal transformation" misrepresents her use of the term "shame." When Yang Jiang says she "did not achieve personal transformation," she is being deeply ironic: where "did not achieve" would normally connote disappointment, her meaning here is that she withstood the political movement and survived intact. The term "personal transformation" (jinbu, lit. "progress"), a popular term for the goal of many Cultural Revolution policies, is just one of many such terms from the language of Cultural Revolution that Yang Jiang uses ironically, effectively showing us that she can speak this language, but refuses to use it seriously. Other people may pursue jinbu or "ideological reform" (xuexi gaizao) if they wish, she says, but she is content to retain her old "selfishness" (sixin) -- and here she turns a term that has negative connotations in the Cultural Revolution into one with the positive sense of 'staying true to yourself.' These densely packed bits of verbal irony add up to a larger political irony: the political movement designed to change her old values only made her more her hold to them more deeply; the strongest ever application of Communist terms and assertions to achieve radical cultural transformation only proved to her that she opposed it utterly.

In a pithy short essay describing Yang Jiang's memoirs, Simon Leys has praised the irony of the book: "Paradoxically, [Six Chapters] is also heavy with all that it does not say." Leys understands quite rightly that this major feature of the work, it's "aesthetic reserve," "is further reinforced by a political taboo." Leys seems uncertain whether Yang Jiang has outwitted the political taboo or not. Kong Qingmao's reading shows us that Leys was right to wonder, because Kong's biography proves that even if some readers are willing or able to decode all that the memoir "does not say," there are other readers who do not. Kong and other such readers who ignore or miss the irony of this memoir align themselves with the official, authoritative reading of Yang Jiang, that it "shows a wound, yet utters no complaint" (yuan er bu nu 怨而不怒). [To be continued...]